


We're So Close to Something Better Left Unknown

by indevan



Series: Rock Band AU [10]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Camping, Falling In Love, Fluff, M/M, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 18:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12041340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: He refused to open his heart to anyone.  He locked it up, chained it deep in his chest.  He took his parents’ advice and kept his emotions flat, blank, robotic.  He never lets himself care too much.





	We're So Close to Something Better Left Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> i live in florida and we're getting the last of our stuff together for hurricane prep so i wrote this to get my mind off of everything lmao

Lapis has always felt calm in nature.  When he was a kid, when the static at home got to be too much, he would go into the woods and sit in silence with nature.  He would sometimes draw or, when he was older, take his handheld camera and film foliage and animals.  At first it was one way to distance himself from his sister, from being thought of as a package deal.  She didn’t dislike camping but she never did it of her own volition.  Back in college, he and 16 would go to the forest that surrounded the school and be in companionable silence.

It’s cool under the trees.  The forest is dense enough here to create a sort of canopy without shading them too much.  The detritus is soft underfoot and he knows that there’s a clearing up ahead.  Lapis tilts his face up to feel the sun as it filters down through the leaves.  People look at him and don’t expect this.  He’s an indie synth musician with a small cult following, after all.  They don’t expect a tree-hugging hippie who likes to camp out in the woods.

“Hey, can we slow down?  Some of us chain-smoked our way through high school.”

He turns to see his boyfriend coming up behind him.  His long, wild hair is barely held back with a clip and he’s already sweating.  He’s carrying their picnic basket and camping supplies for the night, which probably isn’t helping matters.

“Need help with anything?” he asks.

Raditz shakes his head. “No, I told you.  I got it.”

Even with his arms laden down, he manages to flex his bicep.

“I get it, He-Man.” He turns back around and continues walking. “Just don’t come crying to me if you pull something.”

He glances at him from the corner of his eye.  He wonders if Raditz gets what it means to bring him out here.  These woods aren’t the woods he grew up in but it’s still letting him in somewhere that’s special to him.

The forest gives way to the clearing.  He found this part of the woods last week.  The clearing leads to a spring that’s fed into by a stream coming down from the far away mountains.

“Set it down there,” he says.

Raditz drops their supplies and reaches back to remove the clip from his hair.  It falls heavily down his back and he shakes his head out.  He looks out of place in the woods in his destroyed high tops and ripped jeans.

“We’re seriously sleeping on the ground?”

“You’ve slept in a puddle of your own vomit,” he reminds him.

“Excuse you.  It was Vegeta’s vomit, thank you very much.”

Lapis folds his arms over his chest. “I’m not sure why you think that makes it better.”

“I’m just a city boy,” he says. “We never went camping as kids.  I mean, we never really had the time for vacations and junk ‘cause my parents had to work a lot.  Never had the money either.”

He’s dropped to the grass and Lapis comes to sit next to him.  Around them, birds are chirping and he can hear the water from the stream babbling in the distance.  He nods at his statement.  He’s met Raditz’s parents.  They’re warm and inviting--nothing like his own.

“Plus, I’d probably be scared.”

“Scared?”

He nods and starts fussing with their picnic basket.

“Yup.  Bears, wolves, mountain lions...Bigfoot.”

“Bigfoot?”

“They’ve never proved he isn’t real.”

Raditz says it with such conviction that Lapis can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

“You were afraid of all that?”

“I mean, yeah.  And slasher killers.  And bugs.”

He takes the sandwich handed to him but makes no move to unwrap it.  He’s come a long way from the eating issues that plagued his teen years but he’s still rather bad about it.  He only hopes that Raditz hasn’t noticed yet.

“So scissors and all of that?”

“I was afraid of a lot,” he admits.  He takes a massive bite of his own sandwich and speaks with his mouth full. “Kakarrot was the brave one.  He was always running off and trying new things without thinking of the consequences.”

He doesn’t say that it sounds more like his brother was reckless, not brave.

“And now?  I see you onstage.  You don’t look afraid of anything.”

“That’s poor impulse control.  Totally different.”

He gives a dimpled smile and Lapis smiles back.  He eats his sandwich slowly while his boyfriend devours the contents of the rest of the basket.

“That was supposed to be dinner and breakfast, too,” he tells him when he’s finished.

“Oops.”

Raditz stretches his arms above his head and lies back on the grass.  Lapis curls up next to him, one hand stroking his chest.

“You’re lucky I put bananas and bagels in my pack for the morning.  And some other snacks.”

“That’s not enough food.”

He hums a bit and dips his hand lower to rub his stomach.

“You should have thought of that before you ate three meals meant for two people.”

“You let me.”

“I like watching your mouth.”

His lips twist up into a smirk.

“Perv.”

He has no answer for that.

“We could always pop back for dinner,” he says.

Lapis shakes his head and closes his eyes. “No.  I like this feeling of being away from it with you.”

“With me.”

He presses his forehead into Raditz’s shoulder.  With his eyes closed, he is more attuned to the sounds in the clearing.  The birds, the stream, his boyfriend’s breathing.  It feels too perfect, like something he isn’t meant to have but that he was able to claim for his own, despite it all.

He’s never had a boyfriend that’s stuck around.  There was one, before he came out, who ditched him saying that he “wasn’t gay” and left Lapis behind.  Since then, he refused to open his heart to anyone.  He locked it up, chained it deep in his chest.  He took his parents’ advice and kept his emotions flat, blank, robotic.  He never lets himself care too much.

This had started as a curiosity.  Everyone on the tour had had such a  _ visceral _ reaction to Apetail and he wondered why.  He thought their music was fine and their image wasn’t manufactured--it was simply who they all were.  He wanted to get to know one of them and he happened to see Raditz first, stumbling out of Yamcha’s room with a sex-drunk but confused look on his face.  And so they started hanging out and slowly he began to like him.  He was sweet despite himself and he indulged all of Lapis’s weird tastes in movies without question--well, without  _ much _ question.  When he came out to him in an arch, roundabout way, he accepted it--rolled with it.  He feels the chains loosen, but the padlock remains.  He’s afraid to let him in completely.  Afraid of leaving himself vulnerable again.

They lie together until it starts to get dark and Lapis sets up the fire.  They roast marshmallows and he watches Raditz lick the charred goo from his fingers.

“How’s your first camping trip?” he asks.

“It’s not my first--technically.  My grandpa tried to take me and Kakarrot on, like, ‘backyard campouts’ a coupla times but I’d always go in the house to go to the bathroom and end up falling asleep.”

“Then this is your first.  I’m glad to pop your camping cherry.”

It gets the desired reaction: Raditz puts both hands over his face and groans.  Lapis inches close to him and moves his hands down from his face.  It’s warm, so warm, by the fire and warmer close to him.

“Hey.”

He sees the firelight wink in his dark eyes.

“Hey, you.”

Lapis leans in and kisses him.  They undress slowly and even this close to the fire, he feels the early chill of fall send goosebumps on his skin.  Raditz’s hands are warm, though, and slightly sticky from the marshmallows.  He tastes like burnt sugar, too, and everything begins to swirl in his head.

He looks up at him when they’re fully bare and he’s lying on his jeans, the seam of the back pocket digging into his ass.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, sounding awed. “Tell me what you want.”

Lapis isn’t picky.  He reaches his arms up and threads his fingers in his coarse, thick hair.

“You.”

\--

They zip their sleeping bags together but Lapis wakes up alone.  He turns in the bag and sees his boyfriend standing naked in front of the spring, half of a bagel jammed in his mouth.  He crawls out of bed and grabs Raditz’s shirt to pull on.  It being a size medium, even stretched out, it only barely reaches the tops of his thighs.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

He turns and says, grinning wide, “Swim with me.”

It’s chilly--he already regrets not getting fully dressed before leaving the safety of the sleeping bags.

“No.”

He shoves the bagel into his mouth and shrugs.

“Suit yourself,” he says or, rather, tries to.

Raditz bounds into the water, heaving a great splash that manages to get Lapis wet anyway.  He scowls at him.

“Well, may as well get in now, right?”

Raditz has the nerve to look innocent.  He does, though, have a point and, less enthusiastically, Lapis wades into the spring.

The water is cold and he’s shivering before he’s even fully in.  They swim until they’re both shimmering and sees Raditz’s lips turning blue.  Lapis slogs off, still in the soaked shirt, and lies down on the grass.

“I’m so wet,” he complains.

Grinning wolfishly, Raditz puts his hand between his knees. “Are you?”

He’s too wet and cold to remotely be in the mood so he just calls him naughty and pushes his hand away.

They change and pack up after that and Lapis feels a twinge of regret.  It was short-lived but he liked being away from it.  Being the woods, they weren’t “the singer from Sadistic Dance” and “the drummer for Apetail.”  They were just a couple camping out together.  Leaving the forest, he feels like some kind of spell has been shattered.

“You gonna miss me?” Raditz asks.  His voice is teasing but only to hide that he really wants to know.

Three months isn’t a long time.  Not in the grand scheme of things.  It doesn’t feel like it but they’ve been together for months.  He has his own projects to work on and the time will pass like nothing.

“Of course.  Why else do you think I took you camping?”

It’s an easy enough way to put it.  He doesn’t mention how he wants to take his old digital video camera, the one he’d begged, pleaded, and sulked for back in high school, and come out here to film him.  This city dweller in the forest, all torn denim and rock star hair.  How the image of him standing naked in front of the spring is one of the best sights he’s even woken up to.  He wants to piece it together in a weird, esoteric film.  Something artsy and weird.  It matters, then, suddenly more than what his sister wants to work on.

“When you get back, can we make a movie?”

He almost regrets saying it, because Raditz looks confused at the suddenness of it all.

“I’m not an actor.”

“It’ll be silent--mostly.”

Maybe it will be.  Potent images strung together in an artsy fartsy collage he’ll let people attach symbolism to.

“Maybe,” he says. “Would it be like a music video?”

Lapis shrugs.  He hasn’t put that much thought into it but it could work out that way.  At the edge of the woods, Raditz turns to him and puts a hand, still cold from the spring, on the small of his back.

“Okay, you shared some of you with me so let me share some of me with you.”

It hits him for a moment that he understood why Lapis brought him out here and he isn’t sure what to do with that information.  Instead he just tips his head to the side and tells him to show him.

\--

The concert is in an old warehouse.  The windows are blacked out and it’s hot inside, despite the space.  The band is playing onstage, screaming and cursing and playing ragged, jagged music.  The crowd seethes and writhes before them, pulsing together like a singular entity.

“I haven’t been to a show in forever.” Raditz’s lips are right by his ear. “Actually being in a band makes it hard to go see them.”

He nods in understanding.  Things have been accelerating for Apetail so much that he’s barely seen his boyfriend.  And he’s not going to see him for three months.

“You went to a lot of these?”

“Back in the day.  We never were able to thrash long.  Y’know how short Vegeta is, right?  Dudes would, like, elbow him in the head and neck and he’d fucking lose it.  Once he punched a guy in the kidneys so hard, the dude pissed blood right there on the spot.”

Lapis brings to mind Apetail’s guitarist.  There is a difference with that story--which still is fitting for the drunk, angry young man who was on tour with them--and the guy he saw the other day carrying his son on his shoulders.

“You can,” he tells him, gesturing with his chin towards the crowd.

“You sure?”

He nods.

“I’ll hold your jacket.”

The leather is hot in arms and he watches Raditz disappear into the writhing beast.  While he waits, he holds the jacket out.  He doesn’t see him wear it often but it  _ is _ getting colder.  It’s covered in patches but most notably stitched on the back is a monstrous gorilla-looking monster.  It’s brown and has a tail, so he doesn’t think it’s actually a gorilla.  Above it the letters NAMC are embroidered.  He makes a note to ask him about it.

Raditz comes back with a cut on his arm.

“Some fucker had a knife,” he growls.

Lapis blots the cut with a balled up tissue he finds in the pocket of the jacket and he sees him watch him with bleary eyes.

“Be careful.”

Outside, after the show, everyone is drunk and high, not wanting to go home.  Lapis leans against him, smells the leather and oil smell of his jacket.

“You never wear this,” he says.

“It’s my Uncle Toma’s jacket.”

“Who?”

He fingers the zipper and says, “My dad’s best friend.  He taught me how to play drums and how to fix motorcycles, which is what I’d be doing if I wasn’t a rockstar.”

An image comes to mind of Raditz crouched in front of an impressively large motorcycle, the position pulling his jeans tight on his backside.  Motor oil and grease and sweat coating his muscles as they flex with each turn of the wrench or...whatever someone used to fix motorcycles.

“He was in the Northside Apes.  My dad was, too, ‘til he had to get a job after getting his girlfriend pregnant.”

Lapis is surprised at how blithely he states that his dad used to be in a gang.

“It’s how we got our name, y’know.  Apetail?  My parents met ‘cause my dad showed up to class for once and my mom told him that apes didn’t have tails.”

They reach Lapis’s car and sit in the front, not making a move to leave yet.  The parking lot is packed with people and he doesn’t want to inch his way around them just yet.  His ears are ringing and he realizes how hot it was in there, how sweaty he is.

“I should introduce you,” he says, “to Uncle Toma.  He...he was the first gay person I ever knew and he made me feel okay about myself when I was coming out.”

Lapis reaches out to touch his cheek.

“I’d like to meet him.”

He smiles.

“I’d have done it sooner but I’m so used to being around the same people I’ve known forever, I forget that you don’t already know him.”

They drive back to his apartment because it’s closer and he knows his roommates will be out.

“I haven’t had a serious relationship in a long time,” Raditz says.

He brings two beers from the fridge and hands one to Lapis.  When he sits, he lets his legs immediately go up on his lap.  Raditz’s hand squeezes his calves lightly and he gives a little smile.

“Me neither,” Lapis admits.

Is this what it is?  He feels like it might be.  The chains are loose around his heart but he doesn’t want to let them go--doesn’t want to unlock the padlock.  It’s all he’s had to keep himself apart from it all these past few years.

“I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Lapis takes a pull on his beer--that “weird lime ale” Raditz calls it--and lowers it.  He swallows and looks at him.

“I...think I might be as well.”

He thinks of a video of him with pulsing synth in the background.  At a punk show or in the woods.  Dark shadows cut with bright, saturated lights.  He’d look beautiful like that.  Lapis swallows at the admission and the images in his head.  He’s tried so hard and for so long to turn it off.  Beep boop--don’t feel.  Don’t let someone in only for them to toss you to the side like trash.  His hands shake around the cold glass of his bottle.

Raditz kisses him and, in his head, he hears a key slip into the lock around his heart and a nearly audible click as it opens and falls away.  He’s afraid of what that means.

**Author's Note:**

> http://vertigoats.tumblr.com


End file.
